The present invention relates to an information processing technology, and more specifically to a technology for estimating a location posted to social media such as microblogging.
As the use of social media becomes more widespread, there is a desire to know the location at which information was posted to social media by various users. For example, when disaster information is posted by a user, the location of the user can be quickly determined and the necessary countermeasures can be taken. When information is posted to social media via a mobile device such as a smart phone, it is assumed that the location of that device is constantly changing. The global positioning system (GPS) function in mobile devices has been used to address this problem, and there have been attempts to add longitude and latitude information (so-called geotags) to information posted by users (see, e.g., laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-517147). A technology has also been proposed in which the text in posted information is analyzed and the location is estimated from geographic names included in the text (see, e.g., laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-517147 and laid-open Patent Publication No. 2008-158564).